


That's So Hannibal

by Hawkbringer



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Cafetería, Canon-Typical Psychological Manipulation, Class Differences, Codependency, Crack Treated Seriously, Food Fight, Gen, M/M, Male Friendship, Mental Coercion, Psychic Abilities, Resignation to Mental Coercion, Rough Draft, Suicide mention, Swearing, Yes you read that right, dub-con friendship, happy ending kiss, how tf there aint a tag for cafeteria guys, that should be a tag too, that's so raven - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23616319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawkbringer/pseuds/Hawkbringer
Summary: Will Graham has psychic powers, the ability to see the future - but he has no control over when and what he sees. Mostly, this hasn't been TOO big an issue, since he's already resigned to the horrible future his visions always show him. But seeing Hannibal Lecter walk into his class, with his 'exotic' foreign accent and impeccable politeness, was definitely the worst thing to ever happen to him. Until Hannibal decided they were going to be friends, that is...
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Kudos: 20





	That's So Hannibal

**Author's Note:**

> Original Writing Date: July 5th 2015
> 
> So I just watched Futamono, and Gideon is psychotic, while Will is psychic... And that gave me the idea to write Will into a normal high school with Raven's powers. And of course write Hannibal taking an interest in him...
> 
> The //'s indicate italics. The text is broken up into chunks, with varying levels of editing-polish found in each.

Will gets terrible grades. He is not /given/ the opportunity to succeed. He has no breathing room. He is, of course, Ph.D. material, frighteningly intelligent. But he's spending too much time surviving, tugging non-stop to keep his brain from running away from him with associations and condemnations. He is psychologically neutering himself by hand, /every day/. He's in /a lot/ of pain.

Then Hannibal steps in. Will sees him for the first time and is just like, "Oh, /fuck/ no." 

Yeah, say he walks into class and everybody sits up straighter and smiles brighter to gain his favor and the teacher introduces him and Will blurts out, "Oh fucking HELL NO." 

Hannibal's eyes land on Will, and it is as though the entire rest of the world does not matter to him. Will's stomach seizes up with dread as he realizes he has attracted this boy's attention, and he can feel he'll never be rid of it. The teacher reproves Will, but neither of them hear. 

"And your name is?" he asks, quietly, though a pin could have dropped in the silence of the room, perfectly audible. 

"Will Graham," he says after a brief swallow, immediately kicking himself for not lying. This Hannibal kid was /definitely/ going to look him up in the phone book and probably enlist his aid as a tutor, (which his mom would refuse to allow Will to pass up, money being tight,) once he discovers how good Will is at practically every subject. 

He gets terrible grades because he doesn't sleep and can barely keep from hallucinating through his homework. (His brain is built to analyze faces, motives, words spoken and actions taken. His brain gets bored with prolonged reading, and entertains itself with hallucination.) Also, he skips class a lot to try and avoid everyone, but especially Chilton. (In the end, it's Chilton who narc's about Will's intelligence and sets Hannibal on Will's tail.) 

Will doesn't care how he's sure that it will happen, that Hannibal will find out everything there is to know about him. His stomach is leaden with the knowledge. He knows, too, that he will come to learn everything about Hannibal Lecter in time, and there is nothing he can do to stop it.

On the other friends... IDK, Alana would be super-braces-and-bad-hair girl, overly involved in studying for her medical school exams. 

Chilton would be the asshole nobody liked (Caaaarrlos!), possibly also a friend from his childhood Will couldn't escape? He crushes on Alana, who never looks once at him, too introspective and future-thinking to really be present or aware of him. (She's a late bloomer. College does wonders for her hygiene. Perhaps she has Margo as a roommate - wink-wink.) 

Jack would be a next-door neighbor or something. He'd be the most exploitative of the group. Jack would be very big-brotherly, but in both the bad ways, always telling him to get his act together and shape up, (and Alana would be on his side about that,) and then he'd ask Will for his help scouting dates or something, with his super-power. 

No outrageous wigs, just a lot of exploitation, the school counselors not a safe place for him to unload, and his head just gets more and more toxic. His home life isn't great, either. He only has one parent, probably his mother, who works full-time and can barely feed herself, so Will works the night shifts and doesn't sleep for more than about 4 hours a day between the end of school and the start of the graveyard shift. He might catch another hour on the bus-ride to school, or before doing his homework at 6.45am in horrifically sloppy handwriting barely legible from writing on the bus. 

*****

Will hates him. From day 1. Gets a terrible vibe. 

And all of Will's loser-friends love him too, and pull farther away from Will. 

Most of whom are not his /friends/, they're just outcasts like him, the dregs of society, and got stuck in his orbit and haven't pulled themselves out yet. The kind of professional curiosity that Alana and Jack and Chilton have in reference to Will wouldn't be developed in a high schooler. They wouldn't understand his hate, nor attempt to understand it and eventually they leave him because of it. If he /ever/ had a support system, it'd dissolve under the glare of Hannibal's sheer presence. Or his friends would start goading him to use his inexplicable Lecter-magnetism to make /them/ popular. 

What would be really cool is if Will mentions this offhanded at some point to Hannibal, like, one of the reasons I hate you is that my friends are /using/ me to get to you. They don't want me! They want /you!/ Who are you to take away my friends! To take away /everybody!/ You're brainwashing /everybody!/ (Very invader Zim.) 

And they have epic fights in the school yard and Hannibal pulls a lot of airbender shit while Graham is super fueled by passion, and in their last fight, for no reason other than Lecter decides he wants to, he starts fighting Will on /his/ level, and Will /wins/. Partially because Lecter throws the fight, partially because when Lecter attempted that strategy in the fight, the waters were too fraught and he lost control of his thoughts, of the situation. Will has more experience controlling passion into useful avenues. 

Or, say, that's what Lecter thinks. IRL, it's that Will functions best when there are no barriers in his mind - none between thought and action, thought and word. 

***

So Will has 'won,' and the whole school saw, but of course, since they all love Lecter, /everyone/ turns against Will. Even the teachers. Will is /totally/ alone. 

And that's when Lecter sits down with him at lunch one day and cuts all the bullshit while Graham only manages an 'um...' and then a fearful inhale - "You held your own in a fight against me. I can respect a man like that as my equal." Will scoffs, both at the idea that he is a 'man', and that it was a fair fight. 

"Um, /no/," he replies in a grating younger-brother voice /designed/ to get on people's nerves. He designed it specifically for Lecter, to get him to leave him alone. "That wasn't a fight against you. That was a fight against you pretending to be me. When I fight you? The real you? I lose. Every time. 

"Why did you even /do/ that?" he adds since Lecter said nothing in response. Institutional-grade egg is sliding off Will's white plastic spork and Hannibal does nothing to intercept its fall into Graham's lap. "Fight me like that, and lose?" 

Hannibal cocked his head very slightly. "You tell /me/," he invited. Will wanted to rip out his hair - his own first, then Hannibal's second. Instead, he smiled, a sick, poisonous thing that didn't disguise the hate in his eyes, only augmented it. 

"A little birdie told me it was because you just wanted to see what would happen. How thoroughly you could isolate me from everyone. You just wanted to see if /you/ could get me to fall any further than rock bottom. If you handed me a shovel, would I /keep/ fucking /digging/?" 

"And have you?" 

"What are you, a /psychiatrist/?" Graham picked his curly head up off his melancholically-folded arms to glare at Hannibal. "It's fuckin' /obvious/ to you, I can tell. it's all over your face!" His agitated expression broke and he stared at Lecter rather as though he was watching him sprout a second head. "You wanted to see if you could drive me to commit /suicide/. Jesus Christ, you're a /freak/! There's not even a /word/ for what you are, you--" 

"You are correct," Hannibal interrupted him, aware of heads turning in his direction. He risks agitating Graham further to keep up appearances. He leans closer to his face and puts a hand on his near shoulder, comforting, not enfolding. "I wanted to see how far you could sink. But Will?" he paused until Graham lifted his reddened, gleaming eyes to stare Lecter in the face, "I wanted you to /attempt/ suicide. Not succeed. There is no one on this Earth I have ever met who understands me like you do." 

He closes his eyes and reverently presses a kiss to Will's forehead. The poor boy is going into shock and does not react to the stimulus, only registers it to be screamed over later. 

"I have decided that we are going to be friends now." 

"Oh, you've /decided/ this, have you?" Will mutters, his face, his entire frame shaking with rage and impotency. 

"Yes," Hannibal replies simply. He has finished his food by this point, something homemade and elaborate in very small portion sizes. Very exotic, very European. He neatly packs up his lunch bag and just before he stands, he fires off the most gut-wrenching parting shot Will has ever heard delivered /anywhere/. "I seek your friendship because /I/ truly find you interesting, Will. Can you find one /single/ other individual, in this entire school, who can say the same? I doubt it. And therefore," he finishes as he rises, slipping his lunch bag into his larger backpack that never sported an unseemly bulge despite the several large books he, like all students, was forced to carry, "You will accept my offer. Search all you like. I am quite patient." 

Dumbfounded, Will allowed an idle 'what if' to get away from him, his mind spinning a thousand possibilities forward into the future, landing on one in particular and showing it to him. 

It was a vision of the pair of them, clasping hands beneath the table as food flew around them in the cafeteria. A handful of grapes harmlessly bounced off of Hannibal's shoulder, which he barely stirred at, even as Will laughed at him for it. But when a nearly-whole apple thwacked Will in the side of his head, Will's instinctive shout of 'ow!' quieted the entire room in 4 seconds flat. Vision-Will looked at Hannibal, seemingly resigned, and nodded. Vision-Hannibal rose and watching-Will saw something ancient and /evil/ coiled in his eyes. Then the vision cut to black. 

Will's eyes fluttered open, in the reality where Hannibal had just left his side with a truly epic parting shot, and muttered to himself as he tucked into his disgusting, cold, bean-based slop, "Process of elimination, Hannibal. Process. Of. /Elimination./" 

***

Will carefully cataloged the senses and feelings he perceived off of every person he came into contact with at school for a solid week. 

Hannibal had been right. 

No one who knew of his existence, by either name, face, or hearsay, actually /had/ intentions towards him as pure as Hannibal's. And Hannibal would let him stick a shotgun in his mouth just to see how the situation turned out. Hell, he might supply the gun, and saw the barrel off himself to facilitate things. 

Will began entertaining the idea of looking for friends at schools outside of this one, but quickly dismissed it. Between his neuroses, his part-time job, and the frenetic speed at which he did schoolwork in the early, early mornings after sleeping only about 4 hours in between school and night shift, he would have no /time/ for friends that he did not see at school largely-to-exclusively. 

So that further narrowed his search pattern. 

Then he came up against the limits of practicality - an art student that was constantly on the other side of the building, away from the English and Humanities wing would NOT make a good friend, as Will would never have a chance to interact with them during the day. 

He narrowed his search down to people in his classes, a list upon which both Chilton and Lecter scored 3 out of 10. Even 0 should have been too high, Will considered. If he had to share a /school/ with the freak... even /that/ was too much Hannibal for him, at the moment. 

***

And so of course he comes around. Perhaps even Han and Jack fight over who's the better big bro to Will. And when Will covers Hannibal's bleeding nose with a tissue and glares at Jack, the larger boy knows he has lost. He'll never know precisely what it was he lost. But Hannibal /does/. And despite all the things Hannibal will do to wrong him... Will /knows/ it would be /worse/ with /any/one else beside him. 

And so, in the end, when he kisses Hannibal on the last day of school that year, only to have his mouth tongue-fucked more thoroughly than he thought possible, he can't even bring himself to care.

**Author's Note:**

> So I thought this was really good - what do y'all think? :D
> 
> Thank the great quarantine this was posted at all.


End file.
